A Library without Order

Reading through Packing My Library by Alberto Manguel, there were almost endless quotes I wanted to write down and share with you. Some I’m saving for my review but others, like this, demanded to be shared immediately. I love Manguel’s description of his school library as a place without order, rich for exploration and exciting discoveries. That is what every school library should feel like to a child.

My earliest public library was that of Saint Andrews Scots School, one of the several elementary schools I attended in Buenos Aires before the age of twelve. It had been founded as a bilingual school in 1838 and was the oldest school of British origin in South America. The library, though small, was for me a rich, adventurous place. I felt like a Rider Haggard explorer in the dark forest of stacks that had a earthy smell in summer and reeked of damp wood in winter. I would go to the library mainly to put my name on the list for the new Hardy Boys installment or a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. That school library, as far as I was aware, didn’t have a rigorous order: I would find books on dinosaurs next to several copies of Black Beauty, and war adventures coupled with biographies of English poets. This flock of books, gathered with no other purpose (it seemed) than to offer the students a generous variety, suited my temperament: I didn’t want a strict guided tour, I wanted the freedom of the city, like that honor (we learned in history class) that mayors bestowed in the Middle Ages on foreign visitors.

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This strikes a chord with me. My grammar school did not have a central library, but did have shelves of books to be borrowed in each classroom. The books were a mixed group of donated items, and the shelves were always at the back of the room. We were seated alphabetically, and my last name begins with “W”, so I was able to reach the shelves from my desk. Many, many boring classes were enlivened for me by whatever I could reach. Deearstalker, Lady in White, Baseball Legends, He Went withth Marco Polo, Portrait of a Lady, The Five Little Peppers, Treasure Island, and all of Jack London took the place of religion, English, and history classes. (Alas, I found it absolutely necessary to pay attention to maths because it was my bete noir.) School libraries are wonderful.

I’ve lived in many places in Europe and the United States and I have used many libraries. Some have been truly tiny and some would more likely be described as medium sized. I was in the main library in New York City once and was overwhelmed with its size and complexity. I have used university libraries that were so large they existed in several buildings, with each library usually dedicated to one, or maybe two, general subjects.

I moved a couple of years ago within New Jersey and was surprised by the main branch of the county-level library system in my new town. I am used to libraries where all fiction books — regardless of genre — are filed together, alphabetically by the author’s last name. The only exception within fiction in any library I had used was that large print books were often segregated, something that made sense when I thought about it. If you need large print books, you need large print books and they may as well be in one special area.

When I first visited this library, I was impressed by its size and I was looking for some favorite authors and books just to see what they had. I was surprised when I couldn’t find certain books or authors in the fiction area. It was not until my third trip to this library that I discovered the secret — certain types of books had been segregated by their genre. Mysteries were all in one area by themselves, as were science fiction and romance novels.

As I have passed the age of 65, I have been whittling down my personal library, which never numbered more than a few hundred books. After settling or helping to settle three estates in the last couple of years, I realize there is little use for anyone’s old books and I don’t want to foist upon my daughter the task of taking my books to the library for the quarterly used book sale after I die.

This has forced me to look with perspective at what I am keeping on my shelves. Books that I go back and reread every year or so maintain their prized places on my shelves. Books that I use in research as I write my own books and short stories are, of course, keepers. Books that maybe get read only every few years get shunted to a shelf near the bottom for more thought and reflection. If I still haven’t picked up one of those books in the next six months, it usually heads for the library sale. Classics, of course, stay because I want my granddaughter to read what her grandmother and I have enjoyed through the years.

In a year, I have reduced my personal library by more than a hundred books. My goal is to get down to about a hundred books that are either important to me or are books I think my granddaughter (who is only two years old, but loves books) will want to read in the future. That’s it — a goal of a small home library of a hundred or so well-chosen books that mean something to me. In the end, they may mean nothing to anyone else.

To return to Claire’s theme with this thread, are the books organized in any way? Of course not. What fun would that be? The fun is going to a shelf looking for a particular book and finding five others that I had forgotten I had. If the books were organized by subject or genre, I would go right to what I wanted and miss the serendipity of stumbling on something I had forgotten I had.